No. 814: York Place, WC2

It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close, and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round.

[In 1672 George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, sold his mansion York House in the Strand to developers for £30,000. He made it a condition of the sale that his name and full title should be commemorated in the streets that were built thereon and so George Street, Villiers Street, Duke Street, Of Alley, and Buckingham Street came into being. Unfortunately only Villiers Street and Buckingham Street remain, the others having been renamed. The wall in the photograph above is in York Place which is the former Of Alley. R.D.]